Maybe its because the pressure of a course didn’t allow me to see the design for what it truly was, although nothing disastrous and completely playable, the essence of what I really wanted to capture had stealthily slipped from my grip without me realising. I wanted the project to be accessible and easy to get into, so with this in mind I have taken the characters, the world and the core game mechanic and gone back to the drawing board.
The game now consists of three main stages in each level.
1. The opening stage that has a countdown. This countdown represents the time the player has to solve the puzzle and piece the environment back together before “Littleton” (main character) a rescue robot, lands and starts his journey to rescue a stranded robot.
2. The middle stage is when “Littleton” lands and starts moving on a linear path towards his target. Now depending on the level players may need to interact with aspects of the environment to help him reach his goal.
3. The end stage is when “Littleton” reaches the stranded robot closing the level and showing a score screen.
These stages are a set pattern that I can stick to when designing levels to form a pattern that players can continuously relate to, yet they also give me freedom to lengthen each stage as well as what goes into them. With this redesign I also decided to keep the camera isometric and fixed so that players can easily navigate around the level with simple swipes of their finger.
This rule of three is something that I have come across before but has been brought too my attention most recently when I attended a workshop on how to present something successfully. After I did a little bit of research I realised as a design philosophy it allows us to create tasks and objectives that can be easy to understand yet difficult to master. If you want to hear more thoughts on this please read my developer blog post The Rule of Three.
2 comments:
I don't think its necessarily all down to the course and feeling the pressure to get something out on time. Of course that plays a part on all of our minds, but I think under those circumstances it forces us to meet deadlines and refine ideas.
I think it was more down to the technology and the learning curve you were riding at the time. Although you knew what the Unity engine was capable of it was only through play testing that you got a gauge on how well the game worked which lead you to your 3 points to develop in your game.
Glad your keeping the focus alive though and Littleton lives on! I just hope that it doesn't get in you in design rut! Good luck my man
Cheers man, I don't feel it will get me in a design rut, I have an illustrator and a comic artist re-designing the look of the game yet keeping to its original vision. So all I am focusing on is the refined game mechanics and level design. So really the type of game it is will keep it alive :)
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